Sasaki will wear number 11 with the Dodgers. Rojas, who wore that number the last two seasons in LA, switched to 72, the same number he wore as a rookie in 2014.
While thinking about playoff odds and projected standing, or the exorbitant prices of Tokyo Series tickets, here are some Dodgers notes for your Thursday morning.
When Roki Sasaki was introduced at Dodger Stadium on January 22, he was wearing number 11, previously worn by Miguel Rojas the last two seasons.
“I’m really grateful that a veteran like Miguel Rojas has let me wear number 11,” Sasaki said during that press conference two weeks ago. “I haven’t decided yet on what I’m going to give, but I’m going to start thinking about that.”
Rojas talked to reporters Saturday about his decision to cede No. 11 to Sasaki, and switch back to No. 72, which Rojas wore as a rookie with the Dodgers in 2014. Sonja Chen at MLB.com wrote about the number swap:
“When the guy’s coming from a different culture, from a different country,” [Rojas] said, “I want him to feel comfortable in the clubhouse.”
Jack Harris at the Los Angeles Times summarized the various talk from Saturday’s fan fest at Dodger Stadium, with several players and manager Dave Roberts reacting to the Dodgers’ busy offseason, and in some cases responded to some outside backlash.
The excerpt from Harris I enjoyed the most was outfielder Teoscar Hernández joking to reporters, “My family and my friends, they all asked, ‘Are the Dodgers crazy?’”
Eno Sarris at The Athletic wrote about the rise within baseball of the Stuff-plus metric, which is available to search at FanGraphs. Some of the work on the public metric was done by Max Bay, who last year joined the Dodgers as a senior qualitative analyst in November.
From Sarris’ article:
“Stuff+ has really helped bridge the gap between how the public and front offices think about pitchers and pitch quality,” said an MLB team analyst. “Teams keep their own metrics internal, obviously, but given how similarly teams build these metrics and how similar Stuff+ is to what these teams have, Stuff+ helps the casual observer understand what teams are seeing in pitchers.”